The British novelist Jon McGregor is interested in the bystanders to public disasters — the people in the background of the television shot. He is interested not in how deeply they are affected by these events, but how slightly: how they will go on with their lives, preoccupied with their own burdens, which no one will ever see.

McGregor’s fourth novel, “Reservoir 13,” begins with a telegenic tragedy: A 13-year-old girl disappears on the moor in an English village where she and her parents are vacationing for the New Year. Journalists swarm the town. The cameras capture the volunteers searching the hills, the divers searching the river. The police hold a news conference in the local pub. The girl is not found, and eventually the reporters leave.

This is the only conventional plot the novel has, and it trails off quickly. But the rest of the novel asks the question: What would happen if the television cameras stayed? If they turned away from the supposedly newsworthy event, and instead zoomed in one by one on each house in the village and showed us the lives inside?

Television would never do that, of course, but McGregor does. Over 13 chapters, each marking a year, he traces the lives of more than two dozen of the town’s inhabitants. There is birth, death, marriage, divorce, sex, romances kindled and snuffed out. And this is only half the action, because the turn of the seasons, the weather and the life cycles of plants and animals occupy almost as much of the narrative as the activities of the human characters do.

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McGregor is a beautiful, controlled writer, who can convey the pathos of a life in a few lines. Despite the large cast of characters, each feels specific and real, from the vicar, Jane Hughes, who is the closest thing this reticent town has to a therapist, to Gordon Jackson, the town’s Casanova, who, in a sympathetic twist, often seems more hopeful than his bedmates do about the possibility of a lasting relationship.

McGregor captures a village culture that is simultaneously gossipy and reserved. We are frequently told a character “was seen” doing this or that, but not by whom. When a single mother moves to town with her children, we learn that “there were questions” — about her background and where the father is — “but nothing was said to her face.” When one character’s mentally ill sister is taken away in an ambulance, “nobody thought it appropriate to ask questions and he didn’t volunteer.” A widow, covered with bruises from her developmentally disabled son, flinches when anyone gently tries to probe what is going on.

The only flaw in this unconventional but affecting novel is that its central metaphor — the girl’s disappearance — remains obscure. So does the symbolism of the village’s 13 reservoirs, which figure in the search and in the title, and are echoed in the girl’s age and the number of chapters.

We learn that the reservoirs were created, many years before, by flooding valleys; at their bottoms are the ruins of old villages. Perhaps McGregor means for the drowned villages, like the missing girl, to represent the secrets beneath the surface of any life. Or perhaps he means for them to gesture toward the sweep of history, reminding us that the struggles that seem so momentous to one group of people will someday be forgotten.

The book ends, quietly, at the close of the 13th year. A character who is bedridden by a stroke listens from his house to his neighbors singing “Silent Night” in the church, with his granddaughter performing a solo. The town takes a breath. Theirs is the calm not of life’s big questions having been answered, but of putting them temporarily aside.